Griffith, Nanci

Contemporary Musicians
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

Nanci Griffith

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Nancy Griffith is a Texas singer-songwriter, the bulk of whose work is immediately identified with contemporary folk music. She has been recognized for her work as a songwriter as well as an interpreter of other songwriters's works. Throughout her career, Griffith has flirted with popularity; her fans seem to remain steadfast, regardless of critical opinion.

At a time when popular music is, as Detroit News music critic Susan Whitall observed, "bankrupt of inspiration," Griffith offers songs of love, stories of broken dreams, observations of people living lives that are neither heroic nor pathetic. "The people residing within the lines of her songs," Connoisseur reviewer Jared Lawrence Burden stated plainly, "are the salt of the American earth." According to Stephen Holden of the New York Times, Griffith "sings lyrics redolent of the American landscape."

Southern literature and folk music inform Griffith's vision of this landscape. Born in Seguin, Texas, in 1954, Griffith described her family as "basically really dysfunctional," to Texas Monthly. "I had very, very irresponsible parents." Her father was a a graphic artist and printer who sang barbershop quartet music. Her mother was a real estate agent who enjoyed jazz and tried her hand at acting. They divorced in 1960, soon after the family, (including two older siblings), had relocated to Austin.

Early Inspiration

Griffith grew up reading various writers and listening to jazz, folk, and country. When she was 8-years-old, Griffith says she learned to play guitar from an instructional program on public television. She says it was the fiction of Eudora Welty, the voice of folk singer Carolyn Hester, and the songs of country singer Loretta Lynn that imbued her with a passion for struggling human relationships, dreams, and a sense of place that she told Rolling Stone, instilled in her a desire to tell "incredibly vivid stories that hit their subjects right on the nail's head."

The combination of these influences has given rise to a unique Griffith style, which she terms "folkbilly," and which the New York Times defined as a "songwriting style steeped in the rich mixture of Southern literary tradition, folk music, and country."

In Sing Out!, singer/songwriter Tom Russell remembered his first encounter with Nanci Griffith at a folk festival in 1976. One evening around a campfire, with people spread out on a grassy hill into the darkness, guitars and wine being passed around, a gruff voice yelled from the darkness, "Let her play one." From the edge of the campfire light came a waif-like young girl. She began to play and sing in a voice Russell said possessed "a wild, fragile beauty." When she finished and the echo of the applause drifted away, the voice
spoke again: "That was Nanci Griffith. She writes songs."

When she began performing in the 1970s, it was at a variety of Austin nights spots—the Hole in the Wall and Alamo Lounge among them. In that period, Griffith was primarily singing the songs of others while working on her craft. She also began touring the coffeehouse and college circuit and promoting herself. Her earliest recordings were the independently released There's A Light Beyond These Woods and Poet In My Window. Her break came in 1985, after appearing on the acclaimed television program Austin City Limits.

Also in 1985, Griffith moved to Nashville and soon was signed to a recording contract by MCA. Her first hit single was a version of Julie Gold's "From a Distance." It was the number one song in Ireland. Artists including Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea discovered Griffith's music, which they would transform into hit songs. As Griffith continued in the music business, she chased success, opting to embrace a more pop sound with Storms and Late Night Grande Hotel.

Griffith changed labels in the early 1990s, moving to Elektra subsidary Nonesuch Records. Her first recording was 1993's Other Voices, Other Rooms, a collection of other people's songs that she had begun shortly after parting ways with MCA. She has said the inspiration for the project came while recording Late Night Grande Hotel. The songwriters whose work Griffith chose to perform on the project included many who informed her songwriting, including Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton, and the late Kate Wolf.

"All of these songs have a real special place in my heart. They speak of something dear to me in my musical and personal growth," she told Billboard in a 1993 interview.

"Beauty and Dignity" in Her Songs

Griffith had a strong reputation for her songwriting. In Stereo Review Alanna Nash pointed out how Griffith crafts songs "focusing more on character development than outside events." Burden offered a panorama of the focus in her songs: "There is a black middle-class woman living in Houston, caught at a moment of pride and wonder about her marriage. There is a couple arguing at the airport about their lost love. In one of her strongest and best-known songs, 'Love at the Five and Dime,' two lovers' romance is rekindled by memories of the days when they were courting. The aim of these songs is not self-aggrandizement. In the best literary tradition, Griffith gives a voice to the inarticulate, the uninspired, the unheard." She told Paul Mather of Melody Maker, "I want to celebrate the South again. … There's a dignity and beauty there that's not often pointed out."

Her celebration of life is not confined only to songs. When Griffith is not on the road, she writes stories and novels. So far she has completed one manuscript, Two of a Kind Heart, about three generations of a Texas family, and is working on a second, Love Wore a Halo Before the War. There is no division between the focus of Griffith's songs and her prose. Often she turns a story into a song. "Love at the Five and Dime" was originally a short story while "Love Wore a Halo (Back Before the War)," which appears on Little Love Affairs, is drawn from the corresponding novel.

For the Record …

Born in 1954 in Seguin, TX; daughter of Marlin (a printer and publisher) and Ruelene (in real estate) Griffith. Education: Education major at University of Texas at Austin.

Began playing bars in Austin, TX, at age 14; taught kindergarten and first grade in Austin school system briefly during mid-1970s; first recorded for small Texas-based label, B.F. Deal, 1977; recording artist, 1978–; began musical collaboration with band Blue Moon Orchestra on third album, Once in a Very Blue Moon, 1985; appeared on "Austin City Limits," 1985; moved to Nashville, signed by MCA; released Storms, 1989; Late Night Grande Hotel released, 1991; moved to Elektra Nonesuch Records, c. 1991; Other Voices, Other Rooms released, 1993; released Flyer, 1994; Blue Roses from the Moons released, 1997; live album Winter Marquee released, 2002.

Awards: Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Folk Album, for Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1993.

In concert, Griffith combines both mediums. She tells stories both through and between her songs. "Her stories," Mather said, "are sometimes ordinary,
sometimes magical, invariably enchanting." He went on to add that "despite the often upbeat seduction, the lasting memory is of a beautiful sadness." A reviewer for Variety was left with the impression of "an unusual talent, a winsome, almost strangely pure-voiced singer whose style and sound bear little taint of commercialization or contrivance, marked instead by a quirky, honest individuality and soulfulness that connect in gentle, often bewitching ways."

Some critics, however, do indeed consider Griffith's individuality to be contrived. According to Nash, there are some who deem her material "overly sentimental and precious, as affected as the white cotton anklets she wears with the old-fashioned dresses she makes from prints bought on sale from Woolworth's."

Flyer Utilized New Voices

Perhaps her most popular recording to date, 1994's Flyer featured a mix of rock and folk. She enlisted Peter Buck (R.E.M), Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton (both of U2), The Indigo Girls and others.

"I had always felt like maybe I didn't have enough of an idea of who I was to write really personal songs, maybe because I was always on the road and never had a chance to sit back and get some perspective," she told Billboard of her writing on the album. "Now I think I've gained a greater perspective, and this is probably the most personal set of songs I've written."

Critics responded favorably to Flyer. "It's a record that blends the quintessential folk style of Griffith's … Other Voices, Other Rooms with the rock approach she explored on her last two albums for MCA," wrote Billboard 's Jon Cummings. "[I]t was as if working in the crucible of her influences had fired her muse," wrote Hall in Texas Monthly. "The record had some of her best writing in years … plus smart arrangements."

In 1996 and 1999, Griffith was diagnosed with cancer. First, with breast cancer, then thyroid cancer. And still, Griffith continued to be active as a touring and recording performer. She has also lent her celebrity to various charitable organizations including Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. Apart from these few insights, Griffith seems to be fiercely guarded about her personal life.

It would be several years before Griffith would record again. With such a long wait post-Flyer, expectations were high for Blue Roses from the Moons when it was released in 1997. It failed to connect with critics. Lyndon Stambler, writing in People said it "rarely reaches the heavens despite its fanciful title," and found Griffith's voice "lackluster and strained, disappearing at times behind the lush arrangements. In fact, no recording since the one-two punch of Other Voices and Flyer seems to have attracted positive attention from both critics and fans. She tried to recapture some of the magic of those with Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), but it was deemed a poor imitation of the first covers collection. "[W]here the original was inspired, the sequel sounded, like its title, forced," Texas Monthly's Hall. "Griffith—usually such a sure singer—sounded lost. She bent words unnaturally, self-consciously hammering them as if the eccentricity of interpretation would help deliver the meaning."

Responded Vehemently to Reviews

In 1998, fed up with what she called "Years of Brutal Abusive Reviews," Griffith wrote a puzzling, vehement letter to writers and editors at several major Texas newspapers—including the Houston Chronicle and the Austin Chronicle, which printed the letter in full—taking them to task for years of slights and abuses, without divulging any specifics. As Texas Monthly's Michael Hall wrote, the letter was "less a reply to brutality and abuse than an excuse to rant." Even so, to those detractors she is seen as "a greeting-card folkie whose songs are full of sentimental caricatures and sweetness and light. Some go beyond her work and actually attack her personally. They see a faux naïf—an artist too sensitive for her own good, someone so thin-skinned that she mass-mails a hurt letter."

"Why is Griffith judged so much more harshly about her affectations than others? Why did [her] letter inspire such howls of delight? Because she peddles sincerity so baldly in a musical form that has always been sanctimonious about integrity. Because she's so successful at being someone she is not, which drives writers—who would love to be able to pull it off—crazy," he continued. "Why Griffith should care so deeply and bitterly what writers think about her work makes one question why she makes music in the first place. She is an artist, but not because some writer says so," he wrote. "For some reason she was blessed with a beautiful, clear voice that touches people deeply, that speaks to their longing, to what their hearts want but can't have—or sometimes even name."

Perhaps, there is a more logical explanation. As Time's Richard Corliss observed in writing about Blue Roses from the Moons in 1997, "Consumers of pop have become so used to dirges about life's rottenness, sung by grungesters crushed under the weight of money, fame, drugs and women, that any happy music seems like ad jingles." Griffith, then, by comparison is "doomed to good humor" and "the aural equivalent of a good mood."

In 2002, an undaunted Griffith released another live album. With Winter Marquee, she reportedly strove not to repeat what she'd done on previous live recording including One Fair Summer Evening. She reportedly wanted it to be "a slice of a musical life in progress."

The album included covers of Phil Ochs' "What's That I Hear" and Van Zandt's "White Freight Liner Blues" as well as originals such as "Gulf Coast Highway" and "I'm Not Drivin' These Wheels (Bring the Prose to the Wheel)."

Despite the criticism, "Nanci Griffith gives us dreams," wrote Mather. "There's no urge here to reinvent, to introduce a new pop vocabulary, simply a pure joy in her own ability to make music that touches all those places that make you sigh and stuff." In the end, perhaps all that matters is Griffith's ability to step into the light and touch her audience.

Selected discography

There's a Light Beyond These Woods, Philo/Rounder, 1978.

Poet in My Window, Philo/Rounder, 1982.

Once in a Very Blue Moon, Philo/Rounder, 1985.

Last of the True Believers, Philo/Rounder, 1986.

Lone Star State of Mind, MCA, 1987.

Little Love Affairs, MCA, 1988.

One Fair Summer Evening, MCA, 1988.

Storms, MCA, 1989.

Late Night Grande Hotel, MCA, 1991.

The MCA Years: A Retrospective [compilation], MCA, 1993.

Other Voices, Other Rooms, Elektra, 1993.

Flyer, MCA, 1994.

Blue Roses from the Moons, Elektra, 1997.

Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), Elektra, 1998.

The Dust Bowl Symphony, Elektra, 1999.

Clock Without Hands, Elektra, 2001.

From a Distance: The Very Best of Nanci Griffith (compilation), MCA, 2002.

Winter Marquee (live), Rounder, 2002.

The Complete MCA Studio Recordings (compilation), MCA, 2003.

Sources

Periodicals

Billboard, March 13, 1993; August 6, 1994; June 20, 1998; January 15, 2000.

Connoisseur, February 1989.

Detroit News, November 12, 1989.

Guitar Player, June 1993.

High Fidelity, June 1988.

Interview, August 2001.

Melody Maker, March 19, 1988; April 23, 1988; April 30, 1988.

New York Times, February 10, 1988; April 3, 1988; September 17, 1989.

People, March 7, 1987; March 7, 1988; September 11, 1989; June 2, 1997.

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NANCI GRIFFITH

Like fellow performer Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith straddles the line between country and folk music, her quiet, girlish voice finding an outlet in her confessional songwriting. Unlike Carpenter, however, Griffith failed to make a significant impact on the country charts, perhaps because her literate material and intellectual demeanor did not translate easily into the smooth conventions of mainstream radio. After scoring with several small country hits in the late 1980s, Griffith spent the early 1990s recording pop and rock-oriented music before returning to her folk roots with the acclaimed album, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1993). A consistently challenging artist, Griffith continued to expand her horizons in the late 1990s and beyond, recording an album of her best-known songs with the London Symphony Orchestra and releasing another set of original material, Clock without Hands, in 2001.

Raised in Austin, Texas, Griffith cultivated her early love of music through the influence of her mother, an amateur actress, and her father, a singer in a barbershop quartet. Although Griffith began performing in Austin-area clubs at the age of fourteen, she later decided upon a career in education, receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas and spending several years in the mid-1970s as a kindergarten teacher. In 1977 she returned to performing, enlisting a small local label to release There's a Light Beyond These Woods (1978), a folk-influenced album of her own material. Recording for the small Philo label during the 1980s, Griffith released fine albums such as The Last of the True Believers (1986). A set of acoustic songs recorded with gentle, sensitive accompaniment, the album features several songs that would become regarded by fans as Griffith classics, particularly "Love at the Five and Dime," later recorded by country star Kathy Mattea. Like much of Griffith's finest work, the song boasts a strong narrative line, lilting melody, and lyrics that mine themes of love, regret, and loneliness: "Dance a little closer to me, 'cause it's closing time / And love's on sale tonight at this five and dime."

In 1987 Griffith signed with the country division of MCA Records, where she enjoyed minor hits such as "Lone Star State of Mind" (1987) and "I Knew Love" (1988). With the albums Storms (1989) and Late Night Grande Hotel (1991), Griffith moved in a rock and pop direction, diminishing her limited country recognition but building a strong fan base among a young, urban audience. With its flowing string arrangement, soulful organ, and assertive backup vocals, the title track of Late Night Grande Hotel imparts a pop and R&B feel representative of this phase of Griffith's career. Moving to the Elektra label, she revisited her early influences on Other Voices, Other Rooms, a faithful, affectionate homage to folk legends such as Woody Guthrie and Malvina Reynolds. On songs such as "Across the Great Divide" and "Tecumseh Valley," Griffith uses her quavering voice and sensitive guitar playing to create a mood of warm intimacy. Featuring guest appearances by folk and country legends Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, and Chet Atkins, the album was applauded by critics as a noteworthy attempt to honor the sincerity and truthfulness of classic folk music.

Throughout the 1990s Griffith continued to release personal albums that resisted musical categorization. Flyer (1994), a collection of original material, sports a rock-oriented sound through the use of electric guitar and drums, while Blue Roses from the Moons (1997) is marked by slick production from Don Gehman, the producer for successful 1990s rock band Hootie & the Blowfish. After releasing another album of folk material, Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful) in 1998, Griffith revisited some of her previous material on The Dust Bowl Symphony (1999), an album recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Despite the sophisticated orchestral backing, Griffith retains her air of quiet introspection, proving the adaptability of her unique style. While she is arguably more effective when utilizing the muted, sparse background of earlier albums, Griffith succeeds in capturing on The Dust Bowl Symphony a new, intriguing setting for her talents. Always a prolific artist, Griffith returned to the studio for Clock without Hands, her final album for Elektra, before releasing Winter Marquee in 2002. Recorded for Rounder Records, the parent company of her former label, Philo, Winter Marquee is a live set containing intelligent versions of songs Griffith initially released on previous albums.

A sensitive performer whose restrained voice and intelligent songwriting found limited success on country radio, Griffith has pursued her own musical path, frequently adapting her folk-imbued style to rock and pop formats. Never attaining the far-reaching stardom of some of her country and rock peers, Griffith has nonetheless built up a loyal following over the course of a long and distinguished career.

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Griffith, Nanci

Nanci Griffith

In Sing Out!, singer/songwriter Tom Russell related that he first encountered Nanci Griffith at a folk festival in 1976. One evening around a campfire, with people spread out on a grassy hill into the darkness, guitars and wine being passed around, a gruff voice yelled from the darkness, “Let her play one.” From the edge of the campfire light came a waif-like young girl. She began to play and sing in a voice Russell said possessed “a wild, fragile beauty.” When she finished and the echo of the applause drifted away, the voice spoke again: “That was Nanci Griffith. She writes songs.”

In the contemporary music world, where the drum machine is the musical backbone, dancing is the answer to social problems, and lyrics speak only of vacuous, pubescent angst, Nanci Griffith stands at the edge of light. At a time when popular music is, as Detroit News music critic Susan Whitall observed, “bankrupt of inspiration,” Griffith offers songs of love, stories of broken dreams, observations of people living lives that are neither heroic nor pathetic. “The people residing within the lines of her songs,”Connoisseur reviewer Jared Lawrence Burden stated plainly, “are the salt of the American earth.” According to Stephen Holden of the New York Times, Griffith “sings lyrics redolent of the American landscape.”

Southern literature and folk music inform Griffith’s vision of this landscape. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1954, she grew up reading various writers and listening to jazz, folk, and country. But more than others, the fiction of Eudora Welty, the voice of folk singer Carolyn Hester, and the songs of country singer Loretta Lynn imbued her with a passion for struggling human relationships, dreams, and a sense of place; with, in the opinion of Peter Nelson of Rolling Stone, a “forthrightness and clarity of heart”; and with, as Griffith explained to Holden, a desire to tell “incredibly vivid stories that hit their subjects right on the nail’s head.”

The combination of these influences has given rise to a unique Griffith style, which she terms “folkbilly,” and which the New York Times defined as a “songwriting style steeped in the rich mixture of Southern literary tradition, folk music, and country.” But Griffith is not just a songwriter, “she writes songs,” and her songs are stories. Russell explained the difference: “Nanci’s musical roots are based in folk music, but her writing style always carried evidence of a prose writer’s skills. She has a poet’s eye and a novelist’s sense of time and place.” Griffith told James Ring Adams of the Wall Street Journal that the venerable Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard, with whom she studies, said to her: “You’re a writer. You’re a writer first. You just happen to be a writer who can sing.”

Born 1954 in Austin, Texas; daughter of Griff (a printer and publisher) and Ruelene (in real estate) Griffith. Education: Education major at University of Texas at Austin.

Began playing bars in Austin, Texas, at age 14; taught kindergarten and first grade in Austin school system briefly during mid-1970s; first recorded for small Texas-based label, B.F. Deal, 1977; recording artist, 1978—; began musical collaboration with band Blue Moon Orchestra on third album, Once in a Very Blue Moon, 1985.

and realistic. Stereo Review’s Alanna Nash pointed out how Griffith crafts songs “with a more conversational feel, focusing more on character development than outside events.” Burden offered a panorama of the focus in her songs: “There is a black middle-class woman living in Houston, caught at a moment of pride and wonder about her marriage. There is a couple arguing at the airport about their lost love. In one of her strongest and best-known songs, ‘Love at the Five and Dime,’ two lovers’ romance is rekindled by memories of the days when they were courting.” The aim of these songs is not self-aggrandizement. In the best literary tradition, Griffith gives a voice to the inarticulate, the uninspired, the unheard. She told Paul Mather of Melody Maker, “I want to celebrate the South again.… There’s a dignity and beauty there that’s not often pointed out.”

Her celebration of life is not confined only to songs. When Griffith is not on the road, she writes stories and novels. So far she has completed one manuscript, Two of a Kind Heart, spanning three generations of a Texas family, and is working on a second, Love Wore a Halo Before the War. There is no division between the focus of Griffith’s songs and her prose. Often she turns a story into a song. “Love at the Five and Dime” was originally a short story while “Love Wore a Halo (Back Before the War),” which appears on Little Love Affairs, is drawn from the corresponding novel.

In concert, Griffith combines both mediums. She tells stories both through and between her songs. “Her stories,” Mather said, “are sometimes ordinary, sometimes magical, invariably enchanting.” He went on to add that “despite the often upbeat seduction, the lasting memory is of a beautiful sadness.” A reviewer for Variety was left with the impression of “an unusual talent, a winsome, almost strangely pure-voiced singer whose style and sound bear little taint of commercialization or contrivance, marked instead by a quirky, honest individuality and soulfulness that connect in gentle, often bewitching ways.”

Some critics, however, do indeed consider Griffith’s individuality to be contrived. According to Nash, there are some who deem her material “overly sentimental and precious, as affected as the white cotton anklets she wears with the old-fashioned dresses she makes from prints bought on sale from Woolworth’s.” Griffith’s devoted following, on the contrary, feels she is more affective than affected. Mather explained: “Nanci Griffith gives us dreams . . . that affect because of, rather than despite, their traditionalism. There’s no urge here to reinvent, to introduce a new pop vocabulary, simply a pure joy in her own ability to make music that touches all those places that make you sigh and stuff.” In the end, perhaps all that matters is Griffith’s ability to step into the light and touch her audience. Burden observed: “As she talks, the young men in the audience are wishing that Nanci Griffith were their girlfriend, the older men are wishing she were their daughter, and the women are wishing that they, too, could play guitar and sing.”

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Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites:

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Notes:

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In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list.